Kevin Spacey Foiled by Woody Allen’s Disdain for Technology

Kevin Spacey is having a pretty good year. His latest triumph–after scoring two Academy Awards in the 1990s–was his masterful/slightly hammy turn on the Netflix series House of Cards, which inspired unprecedented binge viewings across the country. (The binge viewing quickly morphed into a national conversation about binge watching, but that’s another story entirely.) Spacey also garnered a ton of nominations for his role as Frank Underwood, the House Majority Whip, although due to aforementioned hamminess, he didn’t win.

One person who almost definitely did not binge watch House of Cards on Netflix was Woody Allen. According to GQ, which just named Spacey as one of their Men of the Year, Spacey really wanted to enable a proper binge watch for the 77-year-old director.

“I wrote him a letter,” Spacey explains, “and introduced myself as an actor he may or may not know. And I sent him a Netflix subscription, because I want him to watch my work.”

Some thoughts. First of all, it’s great that GQ is finally starting to acknowledge the important role that men play in our country. These lists are crucial to understanding artists like Spacey, who finally give a voice to characters as underrepresented as white Congressmen from the South.

Unfortunately for Spacey, the Netflix gesture might be lost on Allen. As Margaret Lyons pointed out, Allen (as recently as last year) said he does not own a computer.

“I have never sent an email in my life. I never received an email. I have two buttons [on my iPhone] I can touch — the weather and the Huffington Post,” Allen told the Wall Street Journal last year, who must have loved to hear that.

This is tragic on a number of levels. With a computer, it would difficult for Allen to watch the internet supercuts of each time he’s either stammered or had sex in a movie. Plus, there’s all the Tablet coverage on Allen as well as his multiple mentions in Tablet’s 100 Greatest Jewish Films feature.

Nevertheless, we wish all the luck to Kevin Spacey in landing a role in a future Woody Allen flick. It’d be great test for Spacey to try his chops at playing the Woody Allen character. To my knowledge (commenters may correct me), the only time Spacey has gone tribe has been as Jack Abramoff in Casino Jack.